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Shocker! Hello Kitty’s not a cat…but here’s where you can find a real one

Hello Kitty, that charming little hair-bowed sweetheart that’s made the folks at Sanrio very, very wealthy for the last several decades, is apparently, according to Hello Kitty expert Christine R. Yano, “not a cat. She’s a cartoon character. She is a little girl. She is a friend. But she is not a cat. She’s never depicted on all fours. She walks and sits like a two-legged creature.” (http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2014/08/hello-kitty-is-not-a-cat)

Umm…somebody forgot to tell HER CAT WHISKERS, HER CAT TAIL, HER CAT EARS AND HER NAME, WHICH HAS THE WORD “KITTY” IN IT. I dunno. Snoopy walks on two legs, too, and homey’s a dog. Then again, Goofy’s a dog, or looks like a dog, and he walks upright and drives a car and has a giant mouse best friend who has a dog as a pet. I always thought that was weird, like Pluto and Goofy were part of some weird cartoon dog caste system and maybe Goofy was working hard behind the scenes to liberate Pluto from the evil Mouse Majority and stuff.

That’s beside the point…Hello Kitty’s not a cat? She’s a little British girl with a twin sister who’s in third grade? I don’t buy it. Girlie’s a cat. You hear me? A. Cat. I’ve owned three cats in my life, Sweeney, Cusack and the recently departed-to-her-ninth-life Frances “Babycat” Houseman Streeter-Zervitz, and I can tell you that they’re masters of subterfuge. If anyone could convince people that she was a British third-grader with a love of jaunty hair-wear, it’s a cat. And then they’d steal your lunch and break some important glass thing on your table while pretending she was never there.

The late Babycat Streeter-Zervitz. She probably knew the answers to this Hello Kitty conspiracy. Like she’d ever tell.

In honor of Hello Kitty, who I am still convinced is a cat, and the cats I have loved and pretended to own (they owned me, of course), I present a quick list of places locally where you can say “Hello, Kitty!” to a sneaky, savvy furry friend of your own.